Tag: beauty ideals

Why were feminists always hated until now? We are witnessing a strange new phenomena, an age where even men seem keen to don the label feminist.

It might seem good on the surface right, like finally men have grown some empathy or something?

Just what we women always hoped for eh?

Unfortunately, this is far from the case.

Feminism used to be a dirty word, because feminism used to challenge the patriarchal system of dominance.

Now feminism has been blunted, in the guise of liberal feminism, it poses no threat to the male system of dominance over women aka patriarchy.

So of course it’s not a dirty word anymore, in fact it’s a useful word, as it conditions women into thinking they aren’t oppressed anymore because everyone, everything, is feminist now.

Now, feminism is the progressive buzz word on everyone’s lips in the West, political parties are keen to champion the cause, celebrities of both sexes regularly claim to be feminists, and the term is constantly bandied about in popular media.

You’d think, with all this apparent newfound enthusiasm for all things feminist that the centuries old system of patriarchy would be done with by now wouldn’t you?

Scratch ever so lightly the glossy surface of the utopia liberal feminism imagines every women to be living in though, and the inequities and injustices are glaringly obvious.

Once women see the truth of their own oppression through the lens of radical feminism, they can’t deny it.

Liberal feminism masks women’s oppression but because it does this, it’s extremely vulnerable to reality.

Even something as simple as asking a liberal feminist conditioned woman if she really believes she’s treated with the same respect as her male colleague, husband, or brother, can create a powerful triggering effect that forces her to confront a reality, she’s long suspected existed, but that her liberal feminist ideology forced her to suppress.

Other great questions to ask a liberal feminist or any woman who has bought into the liberal lie of equality…

Why are high acheiving women still regularly paid 20% less than their male counterparts?

Why, is there a 5.7% prosecution rate of all rape cases committed upon females in England and Wales?

Why is it a human rights violation for a biological male to be denied the right to define themselves as a woman but absolutely fine for women to be told they cannot talk about the basic facts of their biology?

And if we really are all equal now, why are women’s appearances constantly scrutinized while men’s largely left alone, no matter how they appear?

Gay men have more cultural visibility now, including feminine gay men, but where is the Butch lesbian? Where, even is the lesbian at all?

And why is it considered taboo to ask a gay man to consider a relationship with a biological woman, or a straight man to consider a relationship or sexual encounter with a male, but expected that lesbian’s at least consider accomodating biological men aka trans women in their beds?

Could it be that for all the hyperbole liberal feminism is not really feminism at all?

Could it be women still have a need, a very great need for actual feminism, radical feminism, real feminism? The kind of feminism that gives women the solution to their actual problem – male cultural domination.

Feminism used to have fangs, which was why men didn’t like it very much.

Why would they? Feminist philosophy challenged the unequal slave caste system they had built for themselves on every level.

Radical feminists dismantled the social untruths men had been peddling for centuries, such as women weren’t equipped to be engineers, mechanics, or math professors, providing men with reams of evidence to the contrary, women excelling in these and all of the other fields we’d previously been barred from entering.

We did this by raising consciousness in females, awakening them to their own oppression, and offering them a healthier alternative than the patriarchal system that limited their lives.

We did this by pressuring the patriarchal system to allow women access to opportunities, education, and jobs previously denied to us.

Thanks to the Second Wave of feminist activity in the 70’s, we forced the doors open to so many areas of life we had been previously excluded from.

We also challenged the rigid sex stereotypes that dictated women should always be feminine.

This was important and went way beyond mere superficial appearances because by first dubbing feminine inferior, then forcing women to be feminine, and dictating to us what feminine looks like, men had successfully subordinated us to the role they like women in best – servile and passive.

So we rejected the sex stereotyping that told us we must wear make up, wax the hair from our bodies, and don painful stilettos that cripple our feet and cause us injury. We did this because not all of us were feminine, some of us were masculine, and certainly none of us were feminine in the way men wanted us to be.

We redefined what the feminine actually is, which looks nothing like the patriarchal construct of femininity, and we also asserted that women can have masculine traits, behaviours, appearances, manners of speech, ways of sitting, and styles of dress, and that this is totally normal and natural.

We did this because in all our glorious diversity as females, whether we were a masculine expressing female or a feminine expressing one, we wanted to be ourselves.

Previously, before the Second Wave,only men were allowed to be themselves and we weren’t having that anymore.

We wanted to be truckers and oil rig workers, mechanics, and math professors, CEOs and bankers, we wanted to wear pants and cut our hair, we wanted to go make up free, and yes, of course some of us didn’t want those things but that was fine too.

Because not all men want to be truckers and CEOs and bankers and mechanics either. Not all men want to wear pants, some of them want to wear dresses, some of them are much more comfortable staying home and looking after the kids than holding down a 9-5 and being the main breadwinner.

That never held back the men that did want those things though. Why should it, when people are naturally diverse, why should people be limited?

Except of course, women were not considered people back before the Second Wave occurred.

And liberal feminism is working overtime to ensure any progress we have made to liberation is being eroded, indeed we are currently undergoing a big backlash against the idea that women are people in our own right.

Limiting women by enforcing the rigid sex role system ensures patriarchy can continue.

We tried to change that, and we were making progress, but then came the backlash.

We knew men would try to resist women’s newfound emancipation but I don’t think even we could anticipate the multitude of sneaky and devious ways the patriarchy would double down to cling on to an unequal status quo.

So how, after we’d made so much progress, how did society circle back on itself to the point where the idea of what a woman is, is once again all about the constructed stereotype of femininity. The woman box is narrow once again, and according to society comes with liking pink, having long hair, speaking softly, being feminine, and wearing dresses and make-up.

How did we go backward?

And how the hell did we get to the mess we’re currently in where feminism itself has been co-opted and subverted to uphold patriarchy?

Stay tuned for the next part of how the patriarchy lashed back at the Second wave gains feminists had made coming in my next blog post…and stay radical my sisters;)

Feminism is apparently 2017’s word of the year, according to dictionary site Merriam-Webster.

This year was the year we saw the #MeToo campaign, and the outpouring of account after account of incidents of sexual harassment, rape, and assault that women have suffered at the hands of men.

It might seem that finally women are feeling empowered to speak out about the injustices we suffer every day because of our sex class.

Yet, liberation is more than just a hashtag, more in fact even, than just being able to get your attacker to actually serve decent jail time.

True liberation for women will only have arrived when every woman on the planet is valued as a person fully deserving of respect, regardless of whether males approve of her existence, appearance, manner, career, ambitions, and behaviour.

At the moment, we are so far from that point as a sex class.

Yes, sex exists, it is real, and it is the core reason we are discriminated against.

If anyone, particularly a male person, tries to tell you sex does not exist, know that what they are actually attempting to do is prevent you from naming your oppression.

Our biology has, for centuries made us almost universally hated, distrusted, and derided, by men, and because of our biology we have been made second class citizens.

Because of our biology our reproductive choices have been dictated to us by men, we have been subjected to sexual assault, rape, murder, torture, and abuse, again by men, we have been barred from education, the right to vote, and from entering the professions.

And because of our biology, we have been forced to behave, look, talk, walk and dress, as male people want us to, and then dubbed inferior when we have co-operated.

When we have not co-operated we have been demonized, persecuted, medicalised, dismissed as lunatics, or downright ignored.

When brilliant women like Margaret Hamilton, the woman who wrote the code that took humanity to the moon, pop up, they are immediately written out of history.

Of course they must be. Patriarchy cannot tolerate examples of female excellence.

It’s a startling testament to the persistence of women, that Hamilton managed to achieve what she did, given the regressive misogynistic atmosphere of the 60’s, where it was much harder for a woman to get an education than it is in most Western societies today, where there were even less women in science and far less professional women in general.

Yet Hamilton comes along, a clear example of the potential and brilliance and tenacity of women, and what does the patriarchy do with her?

Does it applaud her? Praise her for her triumph despite every obstacle being pushed in her path?

No. Instead it rewarded her immense contribution to humankind by writing her out of history and giving a man the credit.

There are millions of Margaret Hamiltons, both in the past and today, women who from the start are discouraged from bettering themselves through education. Instead of educating themselves, following their passion, and nurturing healthy ambition, women are encouraged by patriarchal culture to become fashion models, strippers, prostitutes, wives, stay at home mothers, domestic servants, appearance obsessed airheads who’s only concern is to make themselves as decorative as possible so they are prime objects for male sexual desires.

Our society does love a servile woman who knows her place, I.e. beneath a man, always.

When women stick two fingers up to patriarchy and persist anyway, even when they excel in their careers, as we frequently do, we are continually undermined, under praised, harrassed, under promoted, and overlooked, simply because we belong to a sex class that male people continually want to oppress.

We are not a free people when society so freely hates and disrespects us if we refuse to adopt the servile position, an inferior station to men.

We are not free if society does not take our word for it when we say we have been assaulted, harassed, raped, beaten, tortured. And it often does not take our word for it, according to rapecrisis.org, of the 85,000 rapes committed upon women in England and Wales, in the year 2017, only 5.7 % resulted in a successful prosecution.

We are not free when we have to remove our body hair lest we be ridiculed and reviled when we walk down the street.

We are not free when we have to starve our bodies of nourishment and healthy food in order for our presence in the world to be tolerated, and for insults and slurs like “fat cow” or “pig” not to be levelled at us.

We are not free when we are sold and traded, trafficked, and used by males for their sexual pleasure.

We are not free when so many legal images and videos of us exist that depict us in degrading positions, being choked, raped, beaten, strangled, tortured, and generally denigrated.

We are not free when we reject males as sexual partners because we prefer females, and society thinks it has the right to force us to accept a penis in our bed, and if we still refuse, label us bigots.

Yes trans activists and liberal feminists I’m talking about you here.

If you are a female person who is not yet a radical feminist, you might even imagine you are free, that because you have a good job, a boss who praises you instead of criticizes you, a husband that loves you, you are lucky.

But are you free, really? How much of your life is lived as you truly would want to live it, and how many times do you do things, say things, wear things, not because you want to but because you feel you have to?

How many times have you felt afraid walking home alone at night because of the threat if male violence?

How often have you wished you could ask your partner to do his share of the chores but feel you can’t do it because it would emasculate him and he might get angry?

How many times have you lowered your voice in the presence of a man, let him talk over you, undermine you, patronize you, while the whole time you simmered quietly inside?

Would you really, truly want to shave your legs if you could be liked, loved in your natural, hairy state?

Men can. They are loved and liked by our society in all shapes and sizes, old and young, fat and skinny, balding and hirsute.

Men do not owe society the debt of being beautiful, for women the luxury of being fine however they are is not allowed.

We must be beautiful and what is considered beauty is solely defined by males.

Men do not live in fear of sexual violence, men do not feel they must lower their voices or stifle their opinions when women are present.

They have not been socialised to be servile, they have been socialised to be waited on, so they do not help out, because they have been taught that to do so is women’s work.

Why should women not be deserving of exactly the same respect as men? Why should we need to be beautiful in order to be allowed to exist? Why should we live in fear of male predatory behaviour, harassment, assault, and abuse?

Why should we have to serve men?

Even when we make ourselves beautiful we are still despised, a woman who is viewed as beautiful by patriarchal standards has no more respect, no more voice than a woman viewed as unattractive.

The only difference of course, is the beautiful woman gets the dubious reward of being even more sexually objectified. But all women, no matter how they appear, are sexually objectified, because under patriarchy we are only viewed as objects, objects that exist solely to serve men, for their sexual pleasure.

Our value is directly correlated to how sexually appealing we are to males. Every single female person who is born learns this, which is why so many of us are desperate to adopt the costume of femininity, the robes of a hairless, infantile, brainless, docile, servile, silent, passive, painted male created parody, a grotesquerie of what men want women to be.

Men do not seem to want opinionated women, strong women, women with lush full hips and natural breasts, men do not want hairy women with bushy armpits and unshaven legs, men do not want successful, brilliant, powerful women.

Most of all men seem firmly opposed to women’s true liberation, to us living as freely as men live, to us being respected as men are.

Of course men don’t want us to be free. Why would they?

They are addicted to the thrill of their superiority, outraged at the very idea of having to share the world with women on any kind of equal footing. Men are entitled to the point of gross arrogance at the very idea that we might be our own beings.

In men’s minds, women only seem to exist for men.

The reason radical (aka real) feminists are derided is because we say the exact opposite. We demand to exist only for ourselves. Patriarchy cannot bear a truly feminist woman, because she continually refuses to exist for men.

She does not need male approval, even if she is sexually attracted to men, she still does not seek their approval.

Just as men who are sexually attracted to women do not seek their approval, the radical feminist who is attracted to males sexually, does not need male approval.

If men are in her life, it will be on her terms, in a mutually respectful, healthy, relationship geared towards equal pleasure for both sexes.

The reason so many women co-operate with patriarchy, why they pluck, wax, shave, and starve, why they do not speak up, why they play dumb when males are around, why they do not display their anger, is not because women have a deep seated burning desire to be as sexually attractive as possible to as many men as they can, so they can have endless bouts of sexual gymnastics.

It’s not about sexual attraction for women. It’s about needing, desperately needing to survive. To not have the whole of society turn on you, persecute you, humiliate you, insult you, threaten you, and sometimes even, kill you.

For women, culture indoctrinates us that to survive in this culture we need to be sexually attractive to males.

Culture teaches us, we must be complicit to male desire. It tells us we must be pretty, passive, subservient, and that if we are not we will suffer a heavy penalty.

Women are killed every day, even in Britain, supposedly one of the most progressive countries on the planet for women, killed for not cooperating with patriarchy, for daring to go against their violent husband’s wishes, for standing up to men’s abuses, for refusing their sexual advances.

Women everyday in Britain, and countries all across the globe are publicly insulted for their weight, looks, appearance, and manner of dress.

Women everywhere are punished should our behaviour be deemed unacceptable, I.e. if we are anything other than passive, docile, servile, particularly if we are not passive, docile, servile to men.

It’s no coincidence the latest wave of so called progressive lefty men rush to champion the prostitute, or as they dub prostitutes, sex workers.

That’s their ideal woman, objectified, exploited, dependant on men for her source of income, hyper-feminized, there solely for male sexual use.

No wonder these so called progressive men much prefer the idea of decriminalizing prostitution, including making it completely legal for pimps and johns to buy and sell women and girls.

No wonder those men eschew the Nordic Model, which criminalizes only the sex buyers, and decriminalises the prostitute, a model that has not only been proven to increase prostituted women’s safety, but also provides them with exit strategies, education, and even financial support so they can leave the exploitative sex trade far behind.

In short, the Nordic Model is a nightmare model for men who seek to exploit women.

The last thing those men want is less women available for their sexual use. Men in general, it must be said, seem to love powerless women, and appear to hate women with agency.

Our media reflects this, we greedily consume story upon story of women as victim, or hyper-sexualized doll mmming and hawwing in fake sympathy at the rape victim, or scrutinizing Kim Kardashian’s thighs, all the while vicariously enjoying the thrill of a subjugated or sexualised woman.

And when we do see a story about a powerful woman, a political woman, a successful female scientist, as a society we feel revolted, our instinct being outrage, how dare she rise above her station?

In our culture, we love to see a powerful woman stripped of her agency, removed of her dignity, disgraced in her profession.

That will teach the uppity c**t, thinks the misogynist.

Oh, Mr Misogynist, we powerful women, we do not lie down. Not for you, so you can beat off in a grubby basement to your hate porn, not for any tom, dick, or harry down the street who thinks they have the right to grade us according to the male scale of value, according to our looks.

We do not lie down,not ever, not for the rapist who chokes us, or beats us, not even when he is penetrating us, he still cannot possess us, for we will never lie down.

We are powerful women, women the world over have this power to resist within them, and so, indeed, all women are powerful.

Women united are especially powerful.

Misogynist, you should fear this.

As a sex class, we will always rise, just like we have always risen, just as we have always resisted you. We will be free.

We will work too, to ensure our sisters are free from your clutches.

We will do this because we know that until women as a class are free, until every woman is free, none of us are free. For as long as it is acceptable for women to be culturally derided for daring to not be decorative, for as long as sexual crimes against women continue to be disregarded as low level crimes, if they are regarded as crimes at all, if you are female you are not free.

None of us can be free. Yet.

We are not free yet. We must change that, so my hope is this year, this coming 2018, every female person will awaken to her bondage. I hope women everywhere will begin to identify the many, many ways we are bound by the invisible chains of patriarchy, and I hope we will begin to break those chains that bind us.

As as radical feminist I am single minded in my desire to bring women to consciousness, to empower then to shake free of the shackles of patriarchy.

There are many like me. We cannot be silenced.

I hope every female will soon come to discover the radical position and learn how it can help to undo the misogynist conditioning that has been indoctrinated into her since birth.

We must undo the false doctrine that has taught women to live in fear and detest our own bodies, that tells us we are not beings in her own right, entitled to our own desires, thoughts and feelings but that we must only exist to please men.

No, we do not. We reject this doctrine. We exist for ourselves.

Let’s, as women, unite with other women to demand true liberation, for all women, everywhere.

Anything that has the potential to topple the established social order as we know is always viewed as scary and a threat to society, at least at the outset. You can often judge how close to the mark a cause hits home by assessing how many are strongly opposed to it, hark back to the pre-civil rights area to see just how many felt threatened by people of colour gaining equal status, at least under law.

As well, women’s full, true liberation directly threatens men’s assumed superiority, jeopardizes their pleasure, dissolves their control, and shatters the natural advantage they have by sheer dint of just being born biologically male.

A society that doesn’t look down on women, or view them as inferior to men, a society run by women, or at least one where women have a dominant say, just as men do now is extremely terrifying to anyone that currently stands to benefit from the status quo.

Guess who that is?

It’s more puzzling why so many women rush to support the current social order but the matter becomes clearer when you scratch the surface. Women want male approval because they love men. They have not yet learned that men don’t like them back very much, at least not when they demand to be treated with equal respect.

This has not as much to do with actual sexual attraction as some people think it does. Often an argument given as to why women don’t support feminist causes goes thus – women want to be sexually desirable to men and dominance in women is a turn off for most men.

It’s not as simple as that.

It’s a plain fact that if we were living in a matriarchy, if we had never heard of male dominance, men would still be sexually attracted to women and the reverse would be equally as true. There is plentiful evidence of this in the matriarchal and matrilineal cultures that flourish today, including in Nagovisi, New Guinea and Umoja, Kenya.

Even a misogynist wouldn’t bother to argue that you can fight who you’re attracted to.

It’s also a near certainty that if we were living in that kind of society, it wouldn’t be a stigma at all for women to be ambitious, to be dominant, to be educated, to be aspirational.

Neither would women have the low status they do now, because in that kind of society, such viewpoints simply wouldn’t be tolerated.

Why did it wind up the other way around?

Not because of male excellence, though that’s what the misogynists would like to suggest but something else.

Brutality.

Violence is the one area where biological males truly excel and they have a natural advantage too, in their strength and in their size. Look back in history and you’ll generally find that the winners nearly always had stronger armies, better equipment, were more militarily skilled, or had the police or other enforcement officers of the law on their side.

This meant the winner rulers history remembers were not the best candidates for the job by a long shot, but did have the most muscle. Even as recently as 1970, women who were demanding access to institutions that had long been male bastions, were being arrested and brutalized.

Violence, or the threat of it, does pay, at least it has worked out that way for men.

This is the bottom line and the biggest reason why, for so many centuries, women have kept quiet, in fear of their lives. If you are scared witless of losing your life or your freedom, of having your children taken away from you, or of being raped or brutalized, I’d say that’s a fairly effective deterrent wouldn’t you?

Even so, there have always been brave outliers, women who would oppose and defy the system, whether overtly, as the suffragettes did, or covertly, as George Elliot did when she published under a male name and defied the strict dress code of the time by wearing pants.

However nowadays, at least in Western countries, things are a changing. It’s no longer so publicly acceptable, at least in some people’s minds, to beat a protester, or lock them up, when they have done nothing except suggest a revolutionary idea.

Women can use this to their advantage, as an effective tool to raise consciousness, though it won’t win them the war.

Because there is also now another spanner in the works and this one’s a lot more sneaky than violence. Capitalism has now harnessed the earning power of modern women, and as well as selling their bodies for profit, as it always has done, it’s now selling things for their bodies direct to them by manufacturing discontent. In a 2016 Dove survey, only 20% of UK women and girls expressed any positive feelings about their appearance.

The backlash against feminism’s gains, has been remarkably effective.

It uses several tools to control women and keep them unhappy, in their own bodies, and therefore easy to subjugate and sideline. The beauty industry and the cultural “beauty norms” it promotes are the strongest tool of the patriarchy in Western culture, now women in increasing numbers are entering the professions, and excelling in their chosen career.

The myth of the happy housewife, has been shattered, but a new, perhaps even more oppressive female stereotype has taken her place – the uber-sexualized, hyper-feminized barbie doll.

This cultural archetype is created and sustained by promoting ever narrower cultural beauty ideals, and demanding women achieve them. It is perpetuated upon women by bombarding them with media images of impossible, inhuman, retouched perfection that they can never achieve, and most effectively of all, by using society as a tool to heap ridicule, social ostracization, and humiliation on any woman who refuses to conform to the beauty norms.

I’ve written a previous blog post all about this, but the beauty, diet, and fashion industries, much as they pretend to be friends to women, are anything but.

So much so, the women they send down the catwalk are starved of all femaleness, to promote clothes made off the backs of Third World women paid a pittance for their hard labor.

Because of the humongous pressure to accept the doctrines of the beauty and fashion industries that have now seeped into society and are infecting cultural norms, women’s energy is being scattered, as they rush to escape the wrath of a society that judges them ever more harshly.

Even as direct violence against women grows somewhat less acceptable in Western culture, our society is becoming evermore superficial, and justifying its obsession with women’s bodies in the name of female empowerment. Now women are encouraged to demand their own oppression, and are primed to do the work of the beauty and fashion industries for them, by claiming, yes, women can have it all, it is possible to look like a perfect Barbie doll and have a high powered job.

But by doing so women sell their personhood, ensuring they are chained to the mandate of staying young and wrinkle free forever, lest they be cast out of society. And unknowingly, they are brainwashed into enslaving other women too, women who can never live up to this impossible standard, or have no wish to.

Women together must unite and reject the impossible cultural demands that are placed on us to fit within the narrow beauty ideal. We must too, support other women who are doing so and we must do it consistently, if we ever want personhood.

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